Distributions - Trinux & Coyote Linux & RamFloppy

Trinux 0.7

The startup message from the boot
disk tells you that Trinux is a project to build a Linux-based
network security toolkit. With that information, you know what
kind of applications you can expect. At first glance, Trinux is
very open structured and therefore a potentially enhanceable
system. It asks you "Do you have another floppy?" to
put in add-on disks. If you answer "no" here, you are
done loading and you have a functional Linux system with nearly
all the tools to operate on a running network, for making
connections with other machines (servers) or similar things. SSH
and 'telnet' are available for remote control. For port scanning
there is the powerful 'nmap' and other special tools like
'adm-smb' (security check for samba servers), 'hunt' (useful to
examine, control and manipulate network connections), 'tcpdump'
and 'ethereal' (sniffing of data packets) or programs to discover
intruders in your network. This is a lot of functionality on not
more than three disks, so Trinux is a very useful tool for
administrators.

RamFloppy 2.2.15

1 disk
Kernel: 2.2.15
Profil: rescue disk

RamFloppy isn't really new, but
it has been a very powerful tool for recovering Linux machines,
especially those with destroyed boot configurations. It's based
on kernel 2.2.15, uses the 'ash' shell and the midnight commander
file browser. With just one disk you can't expect the Holy Grail
of program collection, but you can find all the important tools
for recovering a damaged system - disk and file system tools,
text editors, LILO, some archivers and, of course, 'tar' so the
main task as a rescue disk - as the boot message says - will be
achived. There is a interesting feature that most of the system
commands (cat, chroot, mv, mkdir, date ...) are in real only one
binary named 'busybox' which reminds me of the "good old
days" of 'command.com'.

Coyote Linux 1.22

1 disk
Kernel: 2.2
Profil: Router / Gateway

If you know Coyote only as the
unlucky predator in The RoadRunner cartoons, you should get to
know Coyote Linux. Like nearly all small Linuxes, it's highly
specialized and really great at its task. Coyote Linux takes the
networking capabilities of Linux and achieves the potential to
make a really tiny system running on a good old i486 without any
hard disk and little RAM as a router, gateway or masquerading
server. There are two formats in which to get those tiny
distributions from the internet. The most common is the disk
image you write with dd (or rawrite if the machine is taken over
from a M$ system) to the floppy disk. The other way (used by
Coyote) is a .tar.gz archive with a config script asking lot of
questions so you get exactly a system that meets your needs.
There are pros and cons - you'll get a very small system because
it installs just the modules you'll need. On the other hand,
every hardware change results in the need for a newly created
disk. For us, it worked really good with Coyote. If you have a
machine running Coyote, you'll see a menu system reminding you of
a telnet session to a hardware router, so it's simpel and easy to
control Coyote. Whoever is looking for an opportunity to recycle
his old machine should test Coyote. Very interesting: Coyote
covers PPP and PPPoE so you could use an xDSL connection with it.